抄録
This paper examines Marvell's last two Cromwell poems and proposes a view that they have more in common than usually thought in both their political status and their politically conditioned view of time and history. While "The First Anniversary" is often characterized as a political poem with strong millenarian expectations, the elegy is usually regarded as a nonpolitical piece. However, the elegy, with its panegyric on Richard, Oliver's son and successor, seems to have reflected the concerns of the republican regime that feared an anarchical setback after Oliver's death. Meanwhile, despite the "foreshortened" time accelerating toward the Second Coming "The First Anniversary" tries to impress on us, its view of time and history seems more orthodox in substance, although the heretical representations of cyclical time is partly exploited to celebrate his regime's permanency. In Chapter I, I show that regardless of the eschatological strain that distorts the temporal descriptions in "The First Anniversary", the paradigm through which the poet produces those distorted temporal images stays within the limits of Biblical orthodoxy. In Chapter II, I show that the basic design of the elegy's temporal representations is cyclical. Then, I focus on the elegy's final two lines about Richard's power, and, examining its mildly threatening tone and insinuation of the "second deluge" predicted in Daniel 9:26, I argue that the poem is aligned with the republican regime in its yearning to avoid a setback into "the War of Flood" by smooth succession of the protectorate, and uses the cyclical representations of time to subtly impress legitimacy and permanency of the succeeded protectorate. Then, I finally argue that both the "foreshortened" time and the cyclical time are rather politically exploited and therefore peripheral to Marvell's more central and essential belief in the providential history with its steady and linear movement.
